Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Liberal Arts: Making Education Visible
- 2 Learning to Read in Texts and Images
- 3 Telling Tales: Art for the Illiterate
- 4 Learning to Speak: The Art of Logic
- 5 The Image of the Master
- 6 The Art of Music
- 7 Arithmetic and Geometry in the Classroom and Beyond
- 8 Looking at the Heavens: Astronomy in Images
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
- Already Published
6 - The Art of Music
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The Liberal Arts: Making Education Visible
- 2 Learning to Read in Texts and Images
- 3 Telling Tales: Art for the Illiterate
- 4 Learning to Speak: The Art of Logic
- 5 The Image of the Master
- 6 The Art of Music
- 7 Arithmetic and Geometry in the Classroom and Beyond
- 8 Looking at the Heavens: Astronomy in Images
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
- Already Published
Summary
Students being educated in the liberal arts should, in theory, have complemented their studies of literature and theology with those of the quadrivium of music, arithmetic, geometry and astronomy. All pupils in cathedrals and monasteries encountered music from their earliest days in formal schooling. They were taught to sing in parallel with learning grammar in order to be able to take part in the liturgy, but this did not constitute a formal study of the art of music. The distinction had been drawn by Boethius, who separated the musician (musicus), who studied the art, from the singer-practitioner (cantus). According to Boethius, ‘it is much better and nobler to know about what someone else fashions than to execute that about which someone else knows’. His treatise, Fundamentals of Music, was the key text for learning music as a discipline in the twelfth century and was the only work on music cited by Thierry of Chartres in his manual of the arts. However more recent texts were available to the twelfth-century student, many of which attempted to bring together material on theory and practice and were designed to teach singing as well as providing some further information for those who were interested. Thus although Guido of Arezzo's Micrologus (written c.1025) repeated the distinction between musician and singer, Guido sought to situate singing within the context of the theoretical art. He declared, ‘I offer […] the precepts of the science of music, explained, so far as I could, much more clearly and briefly than has been done by philosophers, neither in the same way, for the most part, nor following the same tracks, but endeavouring only that it should help both the cause of the church and our little ones’. Although this training provided important groundwork for advanced study, few people seem to have pursued the subject in depth, a fact revealed by the limited new writing on the topic in the twelfth century. Images of the art of Music reflect the tension between theory and practice. The art is usually represented playing an instrument, making her readily identifiable. Yet in addition, some artists explored the history of the discipline, representing the discovery of harmony by Pythagoras or the authors of texts on the subject.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Education in Twelfth-Century Art and ArchitectureImages ofLearning in Europe, c.1100-1220, pp. 130 - 153Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2016